10 Things to consider before having your website re-designed...

1. What is the goal of the redesign?
What do you hope to accomplish? It’s always
important to have a clear understanding of your
reasons and motivations as they should impact
the decisions that you make along the way.
Without knowing these goals the project will lack
direction and you will likely wind up with a
website that still doesn’t meet your needs.

2. Is this going to be just a minor upgrade or a
complete overhaul?
A redesign could be anything from a minor facelift
to an entirely new site. Obviously the time, effort,
and cost involved will vary, but first you should
determine what types of changes are required for
you to meet your goals with the design. If a
complete redesign is done you will also want to
consider to what extent the new design should
resemble the old design. If visitors are coming
back to the site, chances are you will want them
to notice the new design without feeling like
they’ve never been to your site before.

3. What aspects of the current design are most
effective?
Most likely there are some things about the
current design that work very well, and these may
be aspects that you would like to keep or
incorporate into the new design. It’s a good idea
to make a simple list of your likes and dislikes to
help with decisions on the new design.

4. What aspects of the current design are not
effective?
Building on point #3, if you are redesigning the
site you are bound to want to get rid of some
specific aspects of the website or the design. Are
there some characteristics of the design that do
not accurately portray your business to new
visitors?

5. Who are your target users?
During any design process you never want to
lose focus on the visitors. By knowing who you
are targeting and how you can meet their needs,
you will be on your way to building an effective
website. What style of design are your users
going to like?

6. How can the website be more user-friendly?
Improving the functionality and usability of a
website is always a good thing. It’s pointless to
spend time and money on a redesign that looks
great but simply isn’t user-friendly.

7. Does the logo/branding need to be changed
or updated?
Most likely the website will include some form of
a logo or branding. Are these items still up-todate
and will they function effectively with a new
design? If your logo is out-of-date and not
attractive, a new design may not do much good if
it is still using the same old logo.

8. Should the color scheme change or remain
the same?
In point #2 I mentioned that most of the time you
will want to keep the website at least looking
familiar to repeat visitors. Using a similar color
scheme is one of the best ways to accomplish
this. A lot of times it can be a good idea to make
some minor changes to the color scheme, such
as changing shades of colors or adding a few
new colors, just to give the site a fresh look.

9. What screen resolutions are visitors using?
It’s important to know how your visitors are going
to be viewing the site. A program such as Google
Analytics can easily give you this information.
Obviously, a fixed-width design should take into
consideration the typical screen resolutions of
visitors.

10. What connection speed are visitors using?
Knowing the connection speed will help you to
know what types of elements you can include in
the design without causing hardships for the
average visitor.

You only mentioned some of the aesthetics here Robin, all pages are not created equally code wise either, beauty is not just skin deep, design also comes into play with the coding aspect of any site.

Also there is a time and a place to use images over text or ajax vs static content for indexing/seo purposes.

I take it your following this up with a view on designing well with code too and perhaps more indepth into the aesthetics such as grids, typography, understanding colour theming (why you should use certain colours etc..)?